What We Do

The project will provide:
• a set of concepts and methods to support both domain experts and end users in tailoring IoT context-dependent interactive applications through a meta-design approach;
• a platform offering a tailoring environment for domain experts with novel interaction metaphors and multimodal interfaces; and a middleware allowing for identification of dynamic entities, secure communication among them, and usage analysis to infer further adaptation strategies;
• validation in three relevant IoT application domains (ambient assisted living, education and learning, cultural heritage) in order to show the approach generality;
• empirical user experience evaluation in the wild for both the non-professional development activities and the actual user experience.

The overall architecture of the EMPATHY platform is summarised below. The Tailoring environment will allow end users to define the rules for tailoring the applications created by professional developers. The defined rules are interpreted and managed by an Adaptation Engine, which will subscribe to the underlying middleware to be notified when the relevant triggers occur. Thus the Adaptation Engine will enact the actions specified in the triggered rules within the relevant applications and the involved objects. The middleware is composed of a server and various delegates that receive information from the different sensors. The information gathered from the sensors available in the real context is collected and logically organised by the Context Server, which is integrated with security mechanisms and communicates with a behaviour analysis module. The results of the analysis feed a component that may recommend further personalization rules.